TAM on comeback trail, growth gets a leg-up

TAM Media Research, once the country’s premier television viewership measurement agency, has made a strong comeback in the media business four years after it lost its core business to industry body BARC India.

The 50:50 joint venture between AC Nielsen and Kantar Media has recorded 20% annual growth in the last two years after it reworked its business strategy to focus on “the next big evolving areas”, TAM chief executive LV Krishnan told ET.

For the uninitiated, in April 2015, broadcasters, advertising agencies and advertisers had terminated their subscriptions of TAM viewership data to switchover to BARC India. This resulted in almost 75% drop in TAM’s revenues, even as it continued to provide services such as advertisement insertions measurement across TV, print and radio sectors, and PR/earned media measurement .

“We had come down to a quarter of what we used to be, but now we are at half of where we were,” Krishnan said. “We already have 400+ clients now and our focus is now on the next big evolving areas.”

He said 2016 was a tough year for TAM, but the company started a new journey then. “We were pulled out of the industry viewership study, which was used as a currency earlier. It was handed over to BARC and we created a new JV with them,” Krishnan said.

The key broad areas that TAM started to look at included subscription, digital advertising and content, Krishnan said. The idea was that one day the company will be able to map the content consumption at the hyper local level, across screens like TV and mobile.

TAM felt a need to understand how to monetise the value of data, he said. “Data was available, but where TAM put its shoes in were on how to help our clients to monetise the value of the data.”

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